📚 How innovation is bridging the digital divide across Africa’s healthcare systems

Due to social distancing imposed over the last couple of years, the cyber industry has accelerated in all areas of life across Africa, especially in health in a relentless quest for solutions for the Covid-19 crisis. Africa has advanced with entrepreneurs who have tried to make the most of digital opportunities in a sector that has major shortcomings. Most notably, the chronic shortage of skilled personnel on the continent, which the WHO detailed in a June 2022 report predicting a shortage of millions of health professionals in Africa by 2030, an increase of 45% since 2013, when last estimates were made. Yet the report also envisaged a “promising future” for e-health on the continent, noting that a new wave of mobile technology is radically changing the way health care is delivered in urban and rural communities.

However, numbers and opinions of the overall situation aren’t encouraging.

As of November 2020, 34 member states in the WHO African region have developed digital health strategies, but these have so far only been implemented in 12 countries.

Africa has low maturity, is the least advanced in infrastructure, and lags behind the global average in legislation, policy and compliance, standards and operability, and infrastructure according to the Global Digital Health Index Indicator 2019.

Between telemedicine, awareness and prevention through mobile health promotion applications, monitoring of patients and epidemics via electronic medical records, the scope of e-health is wide and there are many levels of difficulty to overcome so called “medical deserts” in Africa, according to Hadi Zarzour, manager of Africa and the Middle East at Evolucare, a French company that publishes health software and an expert in health information systems.

“Today in Africa, there’s a growing ambition to go digital because it allows us to secure data,” says Zarzour. “We no longer lose the patient’s data as we used to do with paper. The information is preserved and digital allows us to store, trace and archive this data for better medical follow-up and to avoid bad communication of medical information.”